


saltwater

by disabledzuko



Series: i am not leaving (you are the one who showed me the ocean) [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: ATLAofColor, Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Pirates, Bending (Avatar), Big Brother Sokka (Avatar), Bisexual Sokka (Avatar), Disabled Zuko (Avatar), Drug Use, Environmental Racism, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Humor, Humor Taken Seriously, Kidnapping, Labor Unions, M/M, POV Sokka (Avatar), Sokka is just a single father of three trying to make it work, and they were pirates! (oh my god they were pirates!), but like not in a scary way. in a goofy way, what if a bunch of pirates were like ARRR let's engage in collective bARRRgaining and be gay
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-14 03:28:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28538838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disabledzuko/pseuds/disabledzuko
Summary: "As kidnappings go, this was a really simple one to ease them into the genre. To Sokka’s immense disappointment, his crew had to have a moral crisis about it."***a pirates AU in which the gaang, the kyoshi warriors, and the freedom fighters are all contracted to kidnap one guy (it's zuko). shenanigans ensue.
Relationships: Previous Sokka/Suki, Sokka/Zuko (Avatar), background Katara/Aang, previous Jet/Zuko (but in a way that respects + loves + honors jet)
Series: i am not leaving (you are the one who showed me the ocean) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2090703
Comments: 44
Kudos: 240
Collections: Legends of Kolor (A collection of ATLA and LOK fics written by POC)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> do you ever have a thought like "damn what if those characters were pirates" and then you end up constructing an intricate universe and plot in which they are pirates? 
> 
> this is very different from the kinds of fics i usually write (or even read!), but i'm so excited to begin this journey with all of you. shenanigans! hijinks! zany plots with zany characters! maybe even a subtextual critique of global capitalism and environmental racism, as a treat!
> 
> thank you so much to my betas/mateys/betARRRRs/partners in crime/partners in brine, [sifu-hotdamn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sifu_hotdamn/pseuds/sifu_hotdamn) and [divorcedzukka](https://divorcedzukka.tumblr.com).
> 
> content warnings for each chapter shall be in the end notes, so scroll down if you want potentially spoilery warnings!

The merchant’s roof was still warm beneath Sokka’s palms when he sat up. He’d been waiting up here for hours, his body pressed flat against the roof so he wouldn’t be noticed, and now it was finally dark enough for him to sit up undetected.

It was a hot night, so the target’s window was open. Sokka peered over the edge of the roof at the window in the wall below him. It was a short jump, nothing Sokka hadn’t done before, but he was always nervous about jumping off roofs when he couldn’t see exactly where he was going to land. Call it self-preservation.

He slid his legs off the edge, closed his eyes and made a short, superstitious sort of prayer to Tui and La, before swinging and letting go, landing quietly in the target’s bedroom. It was even darker in the room than it was outside, and it took a few moments for Sokka’s eyes to adjust, before he spotted the target, lying in his bed. 

Standing over him were three figures in armor and skirts, faces white and glowing in the dark.

Sokka was so surprised that he forgot he was in stealth mode.

“Suki?” he exclaimed.

One of the figures turned to look at him, and yep, that was his ex-girlfriend, standing over the target Sokka was trying to kidnap.

“Sokka?” she whispered.

Sokka opened his mouth, perhaps to ask her why the hell she was imposing on his job, when behind him, the bedroom door crashed open, shattering the quiet and revealing a disturbingly familiar silhouette wielding two hook swords.

The target shot up in bed at the noise, but he didn’t even react to Sokka or the Kyoshi warriors surrounding his bed. He just stared directly forward, right at the silhouette in the doorway, his face pulled into a horrified expression.

“Jet?” he yelped.

Jet lowered his hook swords, seemingly taken aback.

“Lee?” he said.

“Lee?!” Sokka and Suki repeated.

What the hell was going on?

_ 48 hours earlier _

When Sokka met with the messenger working for a client promising eight hundred gold pieces for a month-long job, he’d expected the crew to be excited. Even grateful! They  _ never _ got paid this well. They were finally moving up in the world, branching out, taking on bigger and more prestigious jobs, all thanks to Sokka’s client-liaising prowess.

The messenger had told him the basic setup: The client wanted Sokka and his crew aboard the Avatar to capture and bring a guy to the client’s estate in the Earth Kingdom. Just one guy. The nineteen-year-old frail son of some rich merchant in the Fire Nation. Allegedly the nephew of the client. As kidnappings go, this was a really simple one to ease them into the genre.

To Sokka’s immense disappointment, his crew had to have a moral crisis about it.

The crew was sitting on the deck of the Avatar where it was docked to a Fire Nation port. Sokka used to be paranoid about their team briefings, insisting on having them below deck in case people were listening to their decidedly non-legal schemes. This was before a fellow pirate had informed him that  _ absolutely no one cared what other people were talking about on their ships, why are you so self-obsessed, not everything is about you, Sokka, fucking hell. _

So now they had their team briefings on deck, where the sun was shining and the breeze was salty and cool.

“I feel like kidnapping is bad,” Aang said. That was something he’d been doing ever since an unfortunate incident involving a sea spirit had caused Sokka to drag the whole crew to a group healer a few months ago. All Aang’s rigid moral stances were now framed in the language of  _ feeling _ .

“We used to steal gold from rich people,” Toph said. “Now we’re just stealing people from rich people.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly my problem with it,” Aang said. 

“Apparently, it’s the client’s nephew,” Sokka said. “So, we’re just taking him away from one family member and bringing him to another.”

“And, what, we’re just supposed to believe this client?” Katara demanded. “You didn’t even meet him.”

“Well, he did just give us sixty gold pieces upfront,” Sokka said. “That’s pretty convincing to me.”

“Are you kidding me right now?”

“Sixty gold pieces could buy me a new chaofu!” Sokka exclaimed. “ _ Two _ new chaofu!”

“We’re not spending all our earnings on your ugly clothes, Sokka,” Toph said.

Sokka scowled. “How do you know they’re ugly?!”

Katara and Aang exchanged glances but didn’t say anything. Mutiny. His crew had no respect for their captain.

Katara sighed. “So, are we turning down this job or not?” 

Sokka grimaced. “Well, the thing about that is… I already took the gold.”

“Sokka!”

“I’m sorry! I’d never negotiated with a messenger before! It was a totally new type of client interaction and I wasn’t prepared for it! He just put the gold in my hands. What, was I supposed to just give it back?”

Katara put her head in her hands. “We need to stop making you our client liaison.”

“Well, considering the rest of you are a bunch of children—”

“Hey! This sixteen-year-old could kick your ass to the Western Air Temple and back!” Toph interrupted.

Aang frowned. “I feel like we should be more respectful of the air temples as sacred spaces and avoid using them in our examples of violence,” he said. “I also  _ feel  _ that I would be able to kick Sokka’s ass to the Northern Water Tribe and back.”

“Okay,” Sokka said, standing up. “Let’s stop talking about where we could or would kick Sokka’s ass to various locations. Can we all just take a moment and vote on whether we go through with kidnapping this kid?”

“Didn’t you say the guy was nineteen?” Toph asked. “He’s an adult. He’s older than all of us, except you, Sokka.”

Sokka groaned. “Fine. Let’s all vote on whether we kidnap this adult person.”

He raised his hand, as did Toph. Aang looked sheepish but didn’t raise his hand. Katara didn’t move.

Sokka knew a stalemate when he saw one.

“Listen,” he said. “We don’t have to decide right now. We can scope out the job and see if the kid, I mean,  _ adult person _ , is someone we think we can ethically kidnap. If so, we steal him and bring him back to the client. If not, we run off with the gold we already have. Sound like a deal?”

There was a terse moment, before both Katara and Aang nodded. 

Sokka exhaled in relief. Who knew being a pirate involved so much bureaucracy? 

The  _ target _ , which Sokka started calling the guy to hopefully prime Katara and Aang into wanting to kidnap him, was staying at Shidao, a trade port town on the coast of the Fire Nation about twelve hours away. According to the additional paperwork the messenger gave Sokka, the target was Zuko, son of Ozai, the owner of Phoenix Manufacturing. Sokka vaguely recognized the name of the company. The Avatar might have stolen from them at some point in their pirating career.

There was a small ink drawing of Zuko attached, accompanied by a list of physical traits. Five-foot-three, long black hair, scar on the left side of his face. Sokka pinned the drawing and the list to the wall in the hold.

While Aang used his airbending against the sails to navigate their journey to Shidao, Sokka made a list of things to do when they arrived, which included both job- and shopping-related activities. Say what you want about pirating, but the flextime and free travel to various markets around the world was heaven for a shopaholic like Sokka. 

Sokka hadn’t always wanted to be a pirate. Growing up in a village in the Southern Water Tribe, there weren’t a lot of things he wanted to be at all. His and Katara’s mom had died when they were very young. A sickness in her lungs. There wasn’t any way to prove it, but people from their tribe had been getting sick ever since a Fire Nation company expanded their factories to the Southern Water Tribe. Too much ash in their lungs. When Sokka was a kid, all he wanted to be was alive.

When Sokka was fifteen and Katara was thirteen, their dad had left to join the crew on a commercial fishing vessel. Sokka and Katara were mostly left to their own devices, living and eating meals with their grandmother, but spending most of their days roaming around the village and the ocean on their dinghy together.

A year after their dad left, Katara started coughing. Sokka made up his mind. Within a week, they’d packed their things, said goodbye to their grandmother, and left for the southern reaches of the Earth Kingdom in their dinghy. They found a healer off the coast who gave Katara some medicine that made her cough worse, hacking up horrible grey phlegm, before something in her seemed to change, and her breaths no longer made a whistling sound.

Sokka would never admit it, but that whistle in the back of Katara’s throat was the scariest sound he’d ever heard.

The Earth Kingdom was where they met Aang, an airbender on a pilgrimage. He asked to hitch a ride on their boat, which Katara immediately agreed to. It turned out that Aang didn’t have a physical destination in mind, merely a spiritual one. He was seeking enlightenment, whatever that meant. So instead of dropping him off at an actual location, Sokka and Katara just ended up keeping him until he found what he was looking for.

(Sokka privately thought that what Aang was looking for was Sokka’s baby sister. But Aang seemed like a good kid, and having an airbender on a sailboat meant less work for Sokka, so he didn’t say anything.)

They picked up a few jobs here and there, mostly errands and deliveries. They generally stuck to the Earth Kingdom coast and worked their way up. About six months after they met Aang, they met Toph. She’d offered to pay them two copper pieces to take her to her home, an eight-day journey to the north. It was a measly sum of money for such a long trip, but she was a little blind girl who’d heroically and luckily escaped from her kidnappers and needed to go home. How could Sokka say no?

About two days into the journey, it turned out that the girl’s “kidnappers” who were hot on their trail were, in fact, the girl’s “parents,” and the girl was running away from home, making Sokka and his crew  _ actual  _ kidnappers. The worst part was that Toph was loaded and could have paid them  _ far  _ more than two copper pieces.

Still, Sokka knew what it felt like to be young and running from somewhere. Katara used her waterbending to create a fog around the dinghy, and eventually, they were able to shake off their pursuers and make their way north, unscathed. 

To thank the crew for their help, Toph bought them a new boat: a 56-foot junk with woven-reed sails. To thank Toph for her generosity, Sokka offered her a job on the boat.

Toph wasn’t great at sailing, but with her earthbending abilities, she could sense the presence of gold from over a mile away. It turned out to be a pretty useful skill in the pirate business.

The crew took a few days to customize the ship—lining the cracks between the wooden boards with a lightweight clay so that Toph could more easily navigate it—before they continued onward, bouncing from harbor to harbor, picking up jobs, and occasionally stealing from people who deserved it.

They named the ship Avatar, meaning incarnation, embodiment. It was more than a symbol; it was a real, tangible thing the crew owned. It was their home.

The next morning, the Avatar docked at Shidao. While the rest of the crew went to explore the town and replenish their supplies, Katara went to scope out the target. First, she walked to the nearest market to find a map of the town, hoping to use it to figure out where exactly the target was staying. 

The map’s Fire Nation script was different from the Earth Nation calligraphy she was used to reading, so it took her a little longer than expected to decipher it. She sat down on a boulder by the path of the market, spread the map across her lap, and peered down at it. When she’d finally discerned where the target’s house was, she tucked the map into her shoulder bag and stood up. With a quiet snort, Katara realized she didn’t need the map at all. On the other side of the path, standing in front one of the fruit stalls, was the target.

It must have been the target. He was the right height, and the left side of his face was scarred. He was wearing a long black áo dài, which made him look slightly overdressed for the market, where most people were wearing basic tunics. Even though it was a cloudy day, he was wearing a conical hat, tied around his chin with a red ribbon.

Standing on either side of the target were two tall men with swords around their waists. They must have been his bodyguards.

The target picked up a lychee and spoke to the vendor. After a short discussion Katara couldn’t hear, he put the lychee back down and walked to the next stall, his bodyguards close behind him.

Katara waited three seconds, before following the target at a distance. While the target looked around at the merchandise, Katara pretended to browse as well, making sure to keep him in her peripheral vision. 

After a while, the target sat down at a noodle stand to order lunch. Katara glanced around—there weren’t any other places to sit, and it was going to be way too suspicious if she just stood around the whole time the target ate, so she took a seat at the noodle stand, a generous distance away from the target.

While she was looking at the menu and trying to understand what the hell these different broths were, someone sat in the seat next to her. She turned, and saw the target glaring at her with his one good eye, his conical hat dangling around the back of his neck. The bodyguards were sitting on the other side of him, apparently very absorbed in their own bowls of noodle soup.

“Why are you following me?” the target demanded. His voice was kind of gravelly, like he didn’t talk that much.

Katara blinked. “I’m not following you.”

“Whatever you’re selling me, I’m not interested,” the target said, right as the noodle stand owner placed two bowls of noodles in front of him and Katara.

Katara raised her bowl to her mouth and sipped. The spice of the broth caught her off guard. She resisted the urge to cough and placed the bowl back on the counter, eyes watering.

“What if I could tell you your fortune,” she said to the target.

“I’m not interested,” the target repeated.

“You don’t want to know about your future?” 

The target scowled. “I don’t have a future.”

Katara restrained herself from rolling her eyes at that.

“There’s a man in the Earth Kingdom who calls you his nephew,” she said.

The target blinked, then took a long sip of his soup.

“How did you…” he said, before narrowing his eyes. “Who are you?”

Katara raised her hands defensively. “I’m just a humble psychic from the Water Tribe!” 

The target seemed to buy it. He took another sip of his soup before speaking again.

“Do you know anything else about him?”

Katara nodded. “He wants to see you very badly.” (Eight-hundred-gold-pieces badly, she thought.)

The target closed his eyes at that, his mouth narrowed into a thin line. He looked upset. Katara felt kind of bad for him.

“Do  _ you  _ want to see  _ him _ ?” she asked, hesitantly.

The target shook his head with a pained expression. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

The target opened his eyes to glare at Katara. “Aren’t you a psychic?” 

The bodyguards had finished their noodle bowls and were now watching Katara very closely. She put a coin on the table and left, her bowl basically untouched.

Back on the Avatar, Toph, Aang, and Sokka were playing some kind of game involving marbles. They all looked like they were cheating, albeit by different methods.

“Seems like the client checks out,” Katara told them as she boarded the ship. “The target has an uncle in the Earth Kingdom.”

“Great!” Sokka said, pumping his fist into the air, causing a marble to fall out of his sleeve and bounce across the deck. “Let’s kidnap him!”

Katara sighed. “I’m not sure how easy that’ll be. He’s pretty observant. He noticed I was following him even before his bodyguards did.”

“We could break into his room while he’s sleeping?” Toph suggested.

Everyone turned to look at Sokka.

Sokka crossed his arms. “Oh sure!” he said, sarcastically. “Let me just draw up a plan for how we’re gonna break into some rich merchant’s house and steal his son in the middle of the night without getting caught by the target, his personal bodyguards, or the town samurai.”

“Thanks, Sokka!” everyone said, cheerfully.

Sokka was pretty pleased with the plan he ended up devising. According to the information he’d collected and the paperwork the client had provided, the merchant’s house had two shifts for bodyguards. They switched at dusk, when the jelly-owls started hooting. If Sokka climbed onto the roof while the bodyguards were changing places, he’d be able to get up there without anyone spotting him. Then he’d just have to wait until the target was sleeping and the night was dark enough for him to enter the house unnoticed.

Unfortunately, when Sokka entered the house, Suki and the Kyoshi Warriors were already there. And then Jet arrived and woke the target up.

“Jet?” the target yelped.

Jet lowered his hook swords, seemingly taken aback.

“Lee?” he said.

“Lee?!” Sokka and Suki repeated.

Then, before anyone could explain what the hell was going on, four of the target’s bodyguards burst into the room. Sokka whipped out his boomerang and chucked it at the first one he saw, knocking him straight to the floor, while Jet spun around and attacked the one closest to him. Suki flipped into the air and drop-kicked a third, while defending herself from a dagger from the fourth with her fan. 

Out of instinct, Sokka rushed to defend Suki’s back, but a Kyoshi Warrior blocked his path.

“Get over her, dude,” the warrior said.

“Okay,” Sokka said, and leapt over both the warrior and his ex-girlfriend to tackle the fourth bodyguard in the back. One firm tap to the temple, and the bodyguard was out cold. All four bodyguards lying on the ground, Sokka stood up and turned around. He, Jet, and Suki looked at each other in the dark room, breathing heavily after the fight. Sokka glanced over at the target’s bed…

And the target was gone.

Dumbfounded, he looked at Suki. She smirked.

“Hey!” Sokka said. “He was  _ mine _ .”

To his left, Jet scoffed.

“Can it, wheat boy,” Sokka growled.

Still smirking, Suki shrugged. “Finders keepers!” she said, before taking a running leap to somersault out the window.

For a split-second, Sokka and Jet made bewildered eye contact, before they both scrambled to follow her and the Kyoshi warriors who were carrying the target down to the harbor. 

The Kyoshi warriors were fast, faster than Sokka on a good day (although he hated to admit it), but they were carrying a body, which meant Sokka and Jet caught up with them right as they reached Kyoshi, their hundred-foot junk ship.

“Katara!” Sokka yelled, the moment his feet hit the wooden planks of the dock. “Kyoshi anchor!”

There was a cracking noise, and then the sound of bubbles, as Katara froze Kyoshi’s dropped anchor to the sand below the water. She, Aang, and Toph ran down the gangplank to meet Sokka and Jet on the dock.

“What’s happening?” Aang asked.

“What’s  _ he  _ doing here?” Katara demanded, pointing at Jet.

“I don’t know,” Sokka said, truthfully. “Let me talk to Suki and figure this out.”

He and Jet walked up the gangplank to Kyoshi’s deck, where Suki and four other Kyoshi warriors were standing. The target was sitting cross-legged on the deck, wearing a night tunic and a very put-out expression. His hands were tied behind his back.

“Release our anchor,” Suki said. 

“Not until you release my hostage,” Sokka said.

“He’s my hostage too,” Jet said. “I’m getting paid seven hundred gold pieces for this.”

“Are you kidding me?” Suki said. “They were only paying us six hundred. And we have a larger crew. Motherfuckers.”

Sokka did not say anything about the eight hundred gold pieces he and his crew were promised.

“The gender wage gap in pirating is criminal,” one of the Kyoshi warriors said, to which the others nodded in agreement.

“I hear you, sister!” Jet replied.

“Dude, shut the fuck up,” Suki said.

“Hey, guys?” the target said. Everyone looked down at the man sitting on the deck. “Did someone grab my medicine?”

There was a moment of silence as everyone exchanged glances.

“I need my medicine,” the target continued. “If you’re going to kidnap me, fine, whatever. But someone needs to get me my medicine. I can’t live without it.”

“Are you serious?” Sokka asked, suspiciously.

“He’s right,” Jet said. “He can’t leave without it.”

Sokka frowned. How did Jet know about this? 

“The bottles are in a pouch in the chest next to my bed,” the target said. “And if you could bring the jar of cream on the table in front of the mirror, I’d appreciate it.”

Neither Jet nor the Kyoshi warriors said anything.

Sokka sighed. “Fine. I’ll go get it.” He looked down at the dock where Katara, Aang, and Toph were waiting. “Guys, make sure neither the Kyoshi warriors nor the Freedom Fighters leave this dock until I’m back, okay?”

Then he disembarked and ran back up the hill to the merchant’s house. 

Sokka was expecting to have to fight the bodyguards again, but they seemed to have cleared out, leaving the house silent and empty. But they might have gone to fetch the town samurai, so Sokka had to be quick. He went back to the target’s bedroom and quickly found the pouch of medicine in the chest, as well as the jar on the table. Then, he felt like he might as well bring the target some clothes to wear, considering it was a month’s journey to the client in the Earth Kingdom, so he stuffed some clothes in a bag as well. 

But then, while he was in the target’s room, it seemed a shame to  _ not  _ take as much as he could. You know? It might make the target more comfortable if he was travelling with a bunch of his possessions. 

Sokka ended up packing all the target’s clothes, jewelry, a bunch of scrolls, a very strange-looking blue theater mask, a conical hat, and a framed picture of a young woman he found hanging on the wall. Maybe a girlfriend?

He returned to the ship with a sack of the target’s possessions slung over his shoulder. He tossed it down on the deck next to the target.

“Thank you,” the target said.

“Yeah, okay,” Sokka said, a little winded from running with this heavy bag.

“So what now?” Jet asked.

“Well,  _ we  _ were the ones who actually took him,” Suki said, crossing her arms.

“Yeah, while  _ we  _ were busy saving all our lives!” Jet retorted.

“What if we let him decide?” Sokka suggested.

“What?” Suki and Jet said.

Sokka shrugged. “The dude’s gotta stay with one of us for a month. Maybe he should decide which one.”

They all looked down at the target, who was attempting to scratch his nose with his shoulder. The target looked up. “Wow,” he said, drily. “I feel like the belle of the ball.”

Jet muttered something under his breath.

“So, I hope you all realize who I am,” the target said.

“Obviously,” Suki replied.

The target shook his head. “No, I mean, my father is a very wealthy, powerful man, and he’s gonna be pissed when he finds out you’ve stolen something from him.”

“Well, duh,” Jet said. 

“He’s not a merciful man when he’s pissed,” the target said, simply.

Sokka narrowed his eyes. “You’re clearly getting at something,” he said. “What is it?”

“You’re gonna need all the help you can get if my dad comes after you,” the target said. “I would team up if I were you.”

Suki scoffed. “Why are we taking advice from the guy we’re kidnapping?”

The target shrugged. “Fine. Don’t take my advice. It’s your funeral.”

“You’re kind of a jerk, aren’t you?” Sokka commented.

Jet laughed. “Oh, you have no idea.”

In the darkness, the target flushed.

Sokka took a moment to think. Then: “Fine. Here’s how it’s gonna go. The target will stay on the Avatar.”

Instantly, Suki and Jet made noises of dissent, but Sokka held up a finger to quiet them.

“Kyoshi will follow and keep watch from behind. The Freedom Fighters will follow at a greater distance, making a motion like this.” 

He used his foot to draw a zig-zag shape on the deck.

He looked at Jet. “You think you can keep up?”

Jet scowled. “Freedom can run circles around your sorry excuse for a vessel.”

Sokka snorted. “When we reach the client, we use the kid to leverage enough gold for all three of our crews. We split it  _ equally _ .”

“Use me how?” the target demanded.

“Oh, don’t worry!” Sokka said, cheerfully. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

He turned to Suki and Jet. “You in?”

Suki paused, then nodded.

Jet grinned. “I’m in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNINGS: environmental racism, illness, death
> 
> MORE DETAILED CONTENT WARNINGS: It is revealed that Sokka and Katara's mother died from lung disease, likely caused by air pollution from Fire Nation factories in the Southern Water Tribe. Katara also becomes sick from the disease, but she recovers with the help of a healer. If you don't want to read this part, stop reading at "Sokka hadn’t always wanted to be a pirate" and start again at "The Earth Kingdom was where they met Aang, an airbender on a pilgrimage."


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which zuko continues to be kidnapped, sokka continues to be disrespected as captain of his ship, and we meet azula <3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for everyone's wonderful response to the first chapter! i'm so delighted at how many people are invested in this goofy fic. know that i read and treasure every one of your comments <3
> 
> content warnings in the end notes

_ Two Weeks Earlier _

There must have been two-hundred people at the convention. Merchants, distributors, buyers, all crowded around the stalls of the Shuhon marketplace, making deals and advertising their products. It was more people than Zuko had seen in months. He barely even registered the crowd in front of him as people. It looked like one big mass.

Zuko’s father was saying something. He was always saying something, at these sorts of events. As the owner of Phoenix Manufacturing, he had his own enormous stall, stocked with jars and bottles of medications. He stood on a wooden platform he’d had a carpenter make for him, so he could better orate the wonders of Phoenix products to the crowd. 

Zuko just had to stand beside him and smile, maybe give a few bows and say something stupid like “Phoenix balm changed my life.” Luckily, these were all things Zuko could do while high off his ass on Phoenix oil. He just had to stay conscious until he could pass out in the rickshaw home.

“The active ingredient is skunk-whale blubber, which gives Phoenix balm a smooth, cooling feeling against the skin,” Zuko’s father continued. That was good. Talking about the blubber meant they were at least three-quarters of the way through his sales pitch. Maybe soon Zuko would be able to leave.

“You’re slouching, Zuzu,” Azula whispered, poking Zuko in the ribs. He tried to stand straighter, but his head was so heavy. 

Azula poked him again. “You have one job, and you can’t even do it right,” she whispered.

That wasn’t true. Zuko didn’t have a job at all.

Zuko was nineteen and unemployed, and he spent his non-convention days getting shepherded around to various estates by his father’s bodyguards. He was basically a glorified housesitter. Actually, he wasn’t that glorified. He was just a housesitter. 

So what if he didn’t see people regularly? His father was busy running the business and his sister was busy learning how to run the business and Zuko just lay around all day in empty vacation homes and got high. 

It wasn’t like he was trapped. He could leave any time he wanted. 

Zuko blinked. The faces of the people in the crowd bobbed in his vision like cherry blossoms in a breeze.

“Look at my son!” Zuko’s father crowed. “A childhood accident left him horribly disfigured and in agonizing pain. But with just a simple application of Phoenix balm every morning and every night, he hasn’t felt the effects of his scar in years.”

“Is that true?” a woman in an orange qipao asked Zuko. “You don’t feel any pain?”

Zuko smiled. His fingertips felt blurry and far away.

“I don’t feel anything at all,” he said.

  
  


Sokka and his crew decided not to keep the hostage tied up, mostly because that felt a little too mean and partially because it didn’t seem like he was going to be able to escape anyway, once they got out into the open sea. After they’d led the hostage to the boat, Aang and Katara worked on undocking, and soon they were back in the ocean, the air smelling pure and salty again.

Sokka gave the hostage a short tour of the Avatar: the main deck where the crew spent most of their leisure time; the hold, which included a small kitchen area and a recreational space for rainy days; the pantry, which the hostage was  _ not _ permitted to enter unsupervised; the ship’s head; Sokka and Katara’s room; Toph’s room; and Aang’s room.

“Where’s my room?” the hostage asked, when the tour was over and they’d returned to the hold.

“We’ll just hang a hammock up here,” Sokka replied. “No problem.”

“No,” the hostage said.

“No?” Sokka repeated.

“I have to have my own room. It’s imperative.” He was very haughty for someone who’d just been dragged from his bed in the middle of the night.

Sokka was about to have a conniption. “I am the captain of this ship,” he said. “I decide the rooms.”

“Great,” the hostage said. “Then decide to give me my own room.”

“No,” Sokka said, imitating the hostage’s own tone. Katara, Aang, and Toph had entered the hold now and had started watching the conversation.

“Are you kidding me?” the hostage demanded. “You guys are the worst kidnappers.”

Sokka laughed. Or was it more of a scream? “This is the worst thing you can imagine your kidnappers doing?” he asked, his voice cracking as it rose in pitch. “You truly cannot imagine us doing anything worse than denying you your own bedroom?”

“My imagination isn’t the one in question here,” the hostage replied, deadpan. “Just look at your interior design.”

He pointed at the drawing of himself that Sokka had pinned up on the wall the night before. Sokka ripped the drawing down and crumpled it into a ball.

“What did you say about my interior design?!”

Aang stepped in between Sokka and the hostage, hands raised in a peaceful gesture. “I feel like it is very late and maybe we should all go to bed. Zuko, you can take my room. I’ll sleep in the hold.”

“No,” Sokka said, shaking his head. “I’ll sleep in the hold. Toph can move into my room with Katara, and  _ Prince Zuko  _ can have Toph’s room.” He glared at the hostage, before remarking, “you know, the client didn’t specify whether he wanted us to bring you to him dead or alive.”

“Cool,” the hostage said. “Goodnight.” 

Then he picked up his bag, went into Toph’s room, and closed the door.

“Hey!” Toph said. “All my stuff’s still in there!”

Sokka sighed. “It’s the hostage’s stuff now.”

Once the anchor had been dropped and the rest of the crew had gone to their rooms, Sokka went up to the deck. He could have just hung a hammock in the hold, but he didn’t like the idea of the hostage bumping into him on his way to the ship’s head. And anyway, it wasn’t the first time Sokka had slept on the deck. He often came out here when he was having difficulty sleeping. 

He lay on the hardwood of the deck, feeling his spine straighten, and looked up at the moon. 

“I will be a better captain tomorrow,” he said, quietly. 

The moon did not reply.

The next morning, Sokka woke with the sunrise. He stood up and stretched out the aches in his back. He was only twenty, and he already felt like an old man.

Soon after he awoke, Katara came up the stairs from the hold.

“Sleep okay?” she asked.

“Ugh,” said Sokka. “And you?”

“Toph snores,” Katara said. “But not as loudly as you.”

“Thanks,” Sokka said. 

He helped her raise the anchor (well, he provided moral support as she effortlessly raised the anchor with her waterbending), and then did some navigation to make sure they were setting sail in the right direction. 

Once Katara, Aang, and Toph had started sailing the ship at a good pace, Sokka went down into the pantry to take stock of the supplies, writing down what they had on a list, which he cross-referenced with the meal plans for the next month. As long as he and Katara were regularly able to catch fish to eat and the hostage didn’t eat more than his fair share, they should have enough food to last until they reached the client without docking anywhere along the way. (He would have to check to make sure Kyoshi and Freedom were well-stocked though. Being responsible for three ships at once was  _ hard _ .)

At around noon, Sokka went back onto the deck, where Aang was airbending into the sails, and Toph and Katara were washing the handrails around the deck. The hostage was also there, lying flat on his back in a pair of black shorts, his conical hat covering his face. Although Katara, Toph, and Aang were working, they kept stealing glances at the hostage. 

Sokka sighed. Who could blame them? They rarely had company over.

“What is he doing?” Katara asked, looking at the hostage.

“I think he’s sunbathing,” Aang replied.

Katara frowned. “But we’re kidnapping him.”

“He’s allowed to sunbathe,” Sokka said, glancing over at the hostage’s pallid torso. “It’s not against the rules.”

“What rules?” Aang asked.

“Fuck the rules!” said Toph.

The hostage twitched. “You know I can hear you, right?” he said, still lying down, his hat over his face. His chest was basically blinding in the sunlight.

Katara crossed her arms. “If you’re just going to sit on deck, you might as well make yourself useful.”

“If you make me clean one spar, I’ll throw myself overboard,” the hostage said.

“He’s a bit dramatic, isn’t he?” remarked Aang.

“Again,” the hostage said. “I can hear you.”

Sokka helped Katara and Toph clean the rest of the deck. At some point, the hostage went below deck and didn’t emerge. In the early afternoon, Sokka went to the pantry to retrieve some seal jerky and buns for lunch, but he didn’t see the hostage. He must have been in his room. Well, Toph’s room.

Sokka considered knocking on the door and asking if the hostage wanted any lunch, but he didn’t. If the hostage was hungry, he’d come out. They were on a tight food budget, anyway.

The hostage didn’t leave his room for several hours. That suited Sokka just fine. He was busy being the captain of a pirate ship. He didn’t have the time to babysit some spoilt rich boy.

But by the time dusk had started to fall and the rest of the crew started assembling dinner, Sokka felt like he had a moral obligation to check on the hostage, even if just to make sure he was still alive.

While Toph was preparing some rice with the fish Sokka had caught that afternoon, Sokka walked over to the door of the hostage’s room. He sighed and rapped on the door with his knuckles.

“Hello?” he said.

“What,” demanded a groggy voice from the other side.

“Dinner’s going to be ready soon,” Sokka said. He wrinkled his nose at how motherly he sounded.

“Cool,” the hostage said. There was some rustling, before the door opened. The hostage’s hair was in a messy topknot, and he was wearing a red tunic. His arms looked a little pink, like they’d been burnt from being in the sun. He looked like he’d just woken up.

“Have a nice nap?” Sokka asked, teasingly.

“What?”

“Nevermind.”

Sokka liked having the whole crew eat at least one meal together each day. It was good for morale and camaraderie, and it meant there was a guaranteed time when all of the crewmembers would be together at least once each day. Which doesn’t sound like it would be hard, considering they all shared the same tight ship, but Sokka didn’t like taking company for granted.

Unfortunately, extending a dinner invitation to the hostage ended up providing the polar opposite of “morale and camaraderie.”

“Now, this?” the hostage said, picking up a piece of fish with his chopsticks. “This is awful. Do you all eat this? Like, every day?”

“Tui and la,” Katara muttered. “Does he have to eat with us?”

“No,” Sokka replied, loudly and pointedly. “No, he doesn’t.”

“Why did you boil this fish?” the hostage continued, as if he hadn’t heard Katara and Sokka at all. “It sucks all the moisture and flavor out of it.”

That  _ was  _ a fair point. Toph definitely wasn’t the most capable chef onboard, and Sokka would have (he hoped) cooked a slightly more edible meal, had it been his turn that night.

Toph laughed. “Yeah,” she said, sarcastically. “Because putting fish in water makes it  _ drier _ . Get a load of this guy!”

The hostage put down his chopsticks and scowled. “Can I cook tomorrow night?” he asked.

Sokka wanted to strangle the guy. Instead, he shoved a huge mouthful of fish into his mouth and replied, mouth full: “Go ahead, buddy.”

  
  


That night, when Sokka looked up at the moon, he felt like it was laughing at him.

  
  


The next day was Sokka’s first briefing with the Kyoshi warriors. He’d promised two meetings a week, including one every two weeks with the Freedom Fighters, just to check in and exchange news about either the hostage or other ships in the vicinity.

Sokka hadn’t gotten much sleep that night, but since he no longer had a room, he also no longer had a mirror to check his appearance. He couldn’t ask Katara and Toph if he could be let into his old room just to look in the mirror because he knew they’d give him shit for trying to look good in front of his ex-girlfriend. Which was stupid. Who  _ didn’t  _ want to look good in front of their ex?

The moment Sokka stepped off the gangplank onto Kyoshi, Suki said, “you look awful.”

Sokka sighed. “Nice to see you, too.”

Suki was wearing her warrior uniform but without the face paint. Her hair was tied in a clean half-ponytail. She looked different than Sokka remembered, in daylight and with her bare face. Maybe she’d just grown older.

“Regretting your choice to keep the hostage on your vessel?” she asked. 

“How did you guess?”

“You have kelp in your hair,” Suki said, smirking.

Sokka groaned. “I’m sleeping on the deck because he requires his own room! He’s so spoiled! He’s driving me nuts.”

“Well, he is being kidnapped,” Suki said.

“And?”

“So, that’s pretty traumatizing,” she said.

“I guess.”

“Maybe you should be kinder to him,” Suki said.

Sokka groaned again, then lay face down on the deck. “Can I stay here for a bit,” he mumbled.

“Yeah, but only if you pick the seaweed off our boom,” Suki said.

“Aye aye, Captain,” Sokka replied, his face pressed into the hardwood.

Being on Kyoshi for a few hours helped recharge Sokka’s brain. Spending time with Suki always rejuvenated him. The way she responded to questions and suggestions from her crew reminded Sokka of what a great captain looked like. It was also just refreshing to spend time with someone his own age, even if they had kind of a messy history and it still kind of hurt to look at her.

Sokka returned to the Avatar in the afternoon, while Aang and Toph were out on deck. He went into the hold to look for Katara, expecting the hostage to be in his room. To his surprise, both Katara and the hostage were in the kitchen area. They were standing over the counter, leaning over a cutting board. Sokka came closer and saw a trout that the hostage was poking with a knife. 

Sokka was a little alarmed that Katara had let the hostage pick up a knife, but he remembered Suki’s advice to treat the hostage with kindness. Did that kindness include letting the hostage stab them? Maybe if it was a light stabbing.

“See, if you cut directly into its belly here,” the hostage said, interrupting Sokka’ thoughts, “you can remove the guts without spoiling the fish.”

“In the Water Tribe, we eat the guts,” Katara told him. 

The hostage hummed. “Why don’t we remove them and cook them separately from the rest of the meat? I’ll show you how we prepare the fish, and you can show me how you prepare the guts.”

“Okay,” Katara said. 

Neither of them seemed to have noticed that Sokka had entered. He felt weird, like he was interrupting something private and important, on his own ship. The weirdness made his stomach feel tight. 

“What are you guys doing?” he asked, trying to keep his tone light.

“Zuko’s making caramelized trout for dinner,” Katara said. 

And maybe that was the source of Sokka’s discomfort, watching someone else teach his baby sister how to prepare a fish because Sokka had never been able to teach her properly. Their mother had died so young, and watching the elders cook without her had been too painful. When Sokka took Katara and left for the Earth Kingdom, he hadn’t learnt all the basic skills. They’d been on their own since then. Sokka had done his best to provide for Katara, but it just hadn’t been enough.

“Do you want to help?” the hostage asked. “You can prepare the rice.”

_ I am the captain of this ship _ , Sokka thought.  _ I am the captain, and I’m taking orders from the prisoner. _

“Yeah, alright,” Sokka said. 

Sokka pointed to a bucket of water and looked at Katara. She nodded, which meant she’d purified the water already. He picked up a pot and a spoon and started to scoop water into the pot, then rice. He shook the pot and it sounded like waves against the shore. 

When Sokka started sparking a fire for the rice, the hostage looked at him, maybe like he was about to teach him how to do  _ that  _ properly, before deciding against it. Smart. If he’d tried to explain how to make a fire, the fish wouldn’t be the only thing getting gutted tonight.

“How did you learn how to cook?” Katara asked the hostage, who was now pulling the organs from the fish’s belly.

“Aren’t you a psychic?” the hostage asked, his fingers red.

Katara laughed. Sokka felt ill.

“Well, I’ve been living alone for most of my life,” the hostage said.

There was a pause, where it felt like Katara was going to say something but didn’t.

The hostage continued: “Before my dad’s company really got started, he was out a lot for business, so I cooked a little for my younger sister.”

“You have a younger sister?” Sokka asked. He knew the guy had a father and an uncle, but he hadn’t considered the fact that maybe the guy also had someone at home who needed him.

He was starting to feel bad about kidnapping him.

“Yeah,” the hostage said. “I do.”

“Where is she now?” Katara asked.

The hostage chuckled. “No idea.”

Azula was, at that moment, stealing a zeppelin. 

_ The Previous Day _

“Your brother’s disappeared,” Azula’s father said. It was the early afternoon, and he was sitting in his main office in Caldera City, behind his enormous hardwood desk. There wasn’t space for much else in the room, including Azula.

Azula frowned. “Disappeared?” she repeated.

“The bodyguards you hired were incompetent,” her father said. “He was taken in the night by pirates.”

Azula wasn’t usually surprised by her brother’s idiocy, but today, she made an exception.

“How inconvenient,” she said.

“Quite,” her father replied, picking up his brush to continue working.

“Has a samurai been informed?” Azula asked.

Her father sighed. “Sales have been low this winter,” he said. “It is not economically prudent to invest in his return.”

“But he promotes the product,” Azula said, frowning.

“Azula,” her father chided, still not looking up from his desk. “It is not economically prudent. Don’t make me repeat myself again.”

“Of course,” Azula said, bowing. “I apologize.”

She left her father’s office. It wasn’t until she got outside that she realized her hands were shaking. She clenched them into fists to stop them. 

Outside the building, sitting by the courtyard fountain, her friends Mai and Ty Lee were waiting. Ty Lee waved when she saw Azula.

“What are we thinking for lunch?” Ty Lee asked, smiling.

“Zuko was taken by pirates,” Azula said. There was no point in beating around the bush.

Ty Lee stopped smiling. She raised a hand to her mouth, eyes wide, while Mai raised her eyebrows in mild surprise.

“Do they want a ransom?” Mai asked. She was always so pragmatic. Azula enjoyed that about her, although she would never admit it.

“They won’t get a ransom,” Azula replied. She put her hands on her hips and straightened her posture.

“What are you going to do?” Ty Lee asked.

“Shut up,” Azula said. “I’m thinking.”

Zuko was, by most standards, useless. He didn’t contribute anything to the company except standing around to advertise Phoenix balm with his gruesome face. They could find almost anyone to do that, and for a lower price than it cost to keep Zuko alive and protected. Her father was right. It was unwise, from an economic perspective, to send someone to look for him.

“Alright,” Azula said, finally. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

The company zeppelin was not usually used for actual journeys beyond filling the airspace above Caldera City, but as director of marketing, Azula decided to make an exception. She signed the appropriate paperwork, of course, with her own and others’ signatures. Then, she, Mai, and Ty Lee took off along the coast toward Shidao and the ocean beyond.

The side of the zeppelin was emblazoned with the words “PHOENIX MANUFACTURING: Buy  _ our  _ balm! Feel  _ your  _ calm!” The whole trip was a golden opportunity to advertise Phoenix products across the Fire Nation. Sales would be up, Azula was sure of it.

After dinner, while Toph was washing up, and Katara and Aang were dropping the anchor, Sokka and the hostage stayed in the hold, sitting around the table. The hostage was acting a little twitchy, like he had something to say, but couldn’t figure out how to say it.

“Spit it out, dude,” Sokka said, finally, after he watched the hostage open and close his mouth for the umpteenth time.

The hostage blinked in surprise, before his face fell back into his usual frown.

“What’s your name?” the hostage asked.

“What?”

“Your name,” the hostage repeated, some of his typical irritability returning to his voice. “I assume you have one.”

Now, Sokka was the one blinking in surprise. “It’s Sokka,” he said. “Have I not introduced myself?”

The hostage shook his head.

“Oh,” Sokka said. He felt kind of bad. “Well, now you know. The name’s Sokka.”

“I’m Zuko,” the hostage said.

“I know,” Sokka replied.

The hostage, Zuko, snorted. “Do you?”

Then he went into his room and shut the door. Sokka stayed in the hold, thinking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNINGS: drugs, ableism/disparaging comments about physical appearance, a slightly detailed description of a dead fish
> 
> MORE DETAILED CONTENT WARNINGS: In the first section of this chapter, Zuko is high on "Phoenix oil," which is implied to be a pain medication similar to real-life opioids. It is revealed that he regularly uses these drugs. Ozai makes a disparaging/unkind comment about Zuko's scar in this opening section, as does Azula when she is thinking about Zuko in her section. While cooking dinner, Zuko cuts open a trout, and there is a semi-graphic description of the fish guts.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what's that? this chapter is basically as long as the previous two chapters combined? because the author fucked up outlining? who could have seen this coming?!! 
> 
> i am a little gardener with a little watering can. all of the flowers are ATLA characters. i water them with a special plant food called "VIETIFICATION." now they are viet <3 you are welcome <3
> 
> potentially spoilery content warnings in the end notes (but know that environmental racism + drug use are big themes in this chapter and fic as a whole)
> 
> please comment/kudos/subscribe/share if you like this story ! thank you again to my betas <3

So Lee from the Earth Kingdom and Zuko the Fire Nation merchant’s son were the same person. To say Jet was surprised would be an understatement.

The night of the kidnapping, Jet returned to Freedom alone, dragging his hook swords behind him. His crew was waiting for him on deck, looking at him excitedly, then in confusion. Jet slumped onto the deck next to Pipsqueak.

The crew exchanged worried glances. Smellerbee was the first to speak: “Where’s the hostage, Jet?”

Jet rubbed his face and sighed. He wasn’t usually lost for words, but he was barely able to  _ think  _ in words right now. He just kept seeing Lee--no,  _ Zuko _ \--staring at him in the darkness, afraid. 

“The Avatar has the hostage,” Jet said, finally. “We’re working together now.”

“Does that mean we have to share our gold?” the Duke asked.

Jet scowled. “Of course not. We’ll get what we’re owed.”

His crew looked unconvinced, exchanging another worried look. Jet hated this. He hated feeling like everyone else was having silent conversations without him.

Then Longshot turned to Jet and nodded, which seemed to release some tension in the air. Everyone started making their way to their places for the night shift, appeased. Sometimes Jet felt like Longshot was the real captain of the ship, and Jet was just the mouthpiece. 

He spat out the stalk of wheat he’d been chewing and went back to work.

Unlike most other pirate crews, Jet and his crew had known each other long before the pirate business. Jet and the others had all grown up in the same Earth Kingdom mining town. Well, as much as a kid could grow up before the age of eleven, when some Fire Nation official decided to build his fourth vacation home at the lake by their village. That was the year everything changed. 

Suddenly, all these other Fire Nation fat cats were buying up land in the area, offering huge sums of money to residents of the village in exchange for their homes. Some people took the money and left. Jet’s parents didn’t.

Then the grownups started to get sick. It started slowly, and in the winter, when it was cold and people frequently got sick anyway. But this sickness wasn’t like anything they’d seen before. 

Jet’s parents were the first to die. Soon, other parents started dying too. The kids weren’t affected, which didn’t feel possible. The kids watched their parents suffer, waiting to die. But the kids stayed alive. 

By summer, the village was a ghost town. Just orphaned kids, wandering around the empty streets, scavenging for food. It felt like the end of the world. Maybe it was.

At some point, a waterbender named Huu came through while journeying across the kingdom. He told the kids there was something bad in the water near the mines. The grownups must have been drinking it while they worked, and it made them sick.

“I’ve never seen water like this before,” Huu said. “It feels like a curse.”

Even at eleven years old, Jet knew it wasn’t a curse. No spirit would have done this. This was the work of Fire Nation slug-hounds, cleaning out their vacation spot in time for the summer season.

Jet didn’t want to leave the place where his parents died, but he didn’t want to die either. Huu helped the kids do a traditional Earth Kingdom funeral for the adults of their village. Then they packed up and left.

A week later, they reached Huu’s destination on the East coast. Before Huu said goodbye to the kids, he gave them the name of a nearby school where they might be able to find an adult to help them. Jet had smiled and promised they would go. 

School. It was a naive idea. What could they learn at a school that they wouldn’t get from real work in the real world? Jet knew better than to trust some grownups with something as important as a human life.

They tried to find work along the harbor. But they were so young and had so little experience, no one wanted to take them on. A few times, a rich tourist would offer them charity, but Jet wouldn’t let anyone accept it. At night, he would go to the inn where the tourists were staying and rob them of everything they had. 

That’s how he knew he’d earned it. It was only a job if he risked his life doing it.

Without stable employment to keep them alive, Jet got better and better at stealing, and soon he taught the others what he’d learned. It was the best education they could have gotten. At night, they slept in a pile of stolen clothes and blankets underneath a pistachio tree. 

“Wish we could steal a house,” the Duke once said, wistfully, during a rainy night, when not even the leaves of the tree could protect them from the wet.

Jet smirked. “Who says we can’t?”

That was how Jet and the kids stole a ship from a harbor. Out on the ocean, they repainted it and replaced its sails so it wouldn’t be recognizable. They named the ship Freedom. It was Longshot’s idea, and when Longshot spoke, you had to respect it. 

So they became the Freedom Fighters, they got better at stealing, and Jet got better at wanting to live.

Then he met Lee.

Lee was a sarcastic, know-it-all, self-righteous, pretentious asshole. 

Jet fell for him almost immediately.

Freedom was getting repairs done after a frightening altercation with a sea spirit, so the Freedom Fighters took their first vacation in years to hang out at a coastal town and talk to the locals. Lee was the server at a tea shop, and he always scowled when Jet entered the shop. Jet lived for that scowl. 

“Hiya, Lee,” Jet would say, taking a seat at the counter and propping up his chin in his hands.

“Jet,” Lee would reply, tersely. “What do you want?”

Jet would raise his eyebrows, Lee would flush, and ten minutes later, they’d be furiously making out in the employee break room. 

Ah. Those were the days.

Jet refused to be nostalgic about it, though. Two months into their… whatever it was, Lee had left in the middle of the night without a word, not even a note. Not even his uncle would tell Jet where Lee had gone.

“So, who’s Lee?” Sokka asked.

Zuko jumped. It was early morning, and Zuko was leaving his room for what was probably the first time that day, while Sokka was budgeting in the hold. Maybe it was too early in the morning to be torturing the hostage, but Sokka didn’t have much else to do.

“Just a name I used once,” Zuko replied, flushing, closing his door behind him.

“Can I call you Lee?” Sokka asked.

“No.”

Sokka pouted. “Alright, pirate booty.”

“I liked you better when you called me your hostage.”

And so the morning continued.

Sokka and Zuko were getting along better, which was a relief. It was unclear to Sokka whether they were getting along because Zuko had stopped being such a prickly asshole or because Sokka had stopped caring whether Zuko was being a prickly asshole. Either way, Sokka stopped getting the urge to stick his head underwater and scream every two hours.

Zuko also seemed to be getting along well with the rest of the crew, especially Katara, which made Sokka suspicious. He asked Aang once, privately, whether Aang thought something was going on between them. 

“You think Katara likes  _ him _ ?” Aang asked, wide-eyed.

“I’m more concerned about whether  _ he  _ likes  _ her _ ,” Sokka said. The idea of the hostage developing a crush on his baby sister… Maybe they  _ should  _ have kept him tied up.

“Who  _ wouldn’t  _ like Katara?” Aang asked, genuinely.

Sokka sighed. This was useless. 

What also helped with the lack of conflict between Zuko and the rest of the crew was that they didn’t have to see him that much. Zuko spent several hours a day locked in his room. Toph thought it might be a Fire Nation cultural thing to take several naps a day, and Sokka didn’t know enough about the Fire Nation to confirm or disprove that. Sometimes Sokka stood outside Zuko’s door to listen and figure out what he was doing in there, but it was always silent. Maybe he  _ was  _ sleeping.

Freedom didn’t usually take jobs. They didn’t get paid, not willingly that is. Their expertise was stealing, and they did it well. But when a messenger sent word of a client looking to steal something from Ozai, owner of Phoenix Manufacturing and a vacation estate at a popular Earth Kingdom lake destination, Jet couldn’t turn it down.

Five days into trailing the Avatar, Jet was starting to regret taking the job.

“You okay?” Smellerbee asked him.

They were on deck in the early afternoon. The rest of the crew was in the process of turning the ship from sailing in a zig-direction to a zag-direction. Typical pirate stuff. Jet was on lookout.

“I’m fine,” he told Smellerbee.

“You’re clearly not fine,” she replied.

Jet scowled and stared at the horizon, broodily. It didn’t calm him down.

“Do you remember Lee?” he asked, turning to look at her.

Smellerbee opened her mouth like she was going to say something, likely sarcastic, but she just nodded.

“He’s the hostage.”

“Lee’s related to that Phoenix fat cat?” Smellerbee exclaimed.

Jet gritted his teeth and turned back to face the horizon.

“Oh, Jet,” Smellerbee said.

Jet was the captain of his boat. He watched his hands clench the railing like they belonged to someone else. He couldn’t let his crew see him weak like this.

“Well, fuck him,” Smellerbee said. “He’s a liar. Liar, liar, shenyi on fire, remember?”

“Yeah,” Jet said, nodding. “Fuck him.”

Sokka, Jet, and Suki met on Kyoshi for their first captains meeting two days later. There was not much to report--all the ships were well-stocked; there were a few small merchant ships to the west, but they were heading in the other direction.

“There’s a storm coming,” Jet mentioned. “Longshot sees it.”

“How far out?” Suki asked.

Jet shrugged. “About a week,” he said. “You’ll feel it soon enough.”

Sokka groaned. He was  _ not  _ looking forward to sailing through a storm with an inexperienced passenger. He just hoped Zuko wouldn’t throw up from the turbulence.

“And how is Zuko?” Suki asked Sokka, as if she knew what Sokka was thinking. She probably did.

“Doing better,” Sokka said. “He still refuses to do any chores, but he’s not a bad cook. He spends most of the day holed up in his room though.”

Jet snorted.

“Something you want to say, wheat boy?” Sokka asked.

“No,” Jet said, with a smirk. Then, “Have you tried talking to him while he’s in his room?”

Sokka shook his head. “I figured the guy wanted to be left alone.”

“I think he’d appreciate it if you paid him a visit,” Jet said. “He tends to get quite  _ lonely _ .”

Suki frowned. “Remind us how you know Zuko,” she said.

Jet shrugged. “Him and I go way back.”

Sokka stroked his chin, thinking. He  _ was  _ pretty curious as to what Zuko was up to all day, and it was clear Jet knew the guy much better than Sokka did. Maybe it was a cultural thing. Sokka hadn’t ever really interacted with Fire Nation people. They might have a different concept of alone time.

“I’m glad you and Zuko are getting along better,” Suki said to Sokka. “I was concerned for a while that you were going to kill each other.”

Sokka sniffed, indignantly. “How dare you insinuate that Zuko would be able to kill me. I’d kill him five times before he hit the ground.”

A few days later, Sokka decided to test out Jet’s idea and see if Zuko wanted any company. There wasn’t  _ really  _ that much to do as captain on a ship with a waterbender and an airbender in the crew, unless he wanted to recalculate the budget for the third time that week, which he promised Katara he’d stop doing. So he knocked on Zuko’s door.

He waited for a moment. Then,

“What?” came Zuko’s voice from the other side of the door.

Sokka took that as an invitation in. He opened the door and entered Zuko’s room.

He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting. Maybe some incredible mess of all of Zuko’s belongings or an elaborate art project papering the walls and floor or even just plain nudity. But no, it was just a normal room, a little messy, and Zuko, lying fully clothed in the middle of the floor and staring at the ceiling.

“Hey, Zuko,” Sokka greeted, closing the door behind him.

“Oh, hey, Sokka,” Zuko replied, a hint of surprise in his voice, as if he hadn’t even noticed Sokka had entered the room.

“Do you mind if I hang out here for a bit?” Sokka asked, tentatively.

“Sure,” Zuko said. “Totally. Absolutely.”

Sokka frowned. He couldn’t tell if Zuko was being sarcastic or not. This was the most accommodating Zuko had  _ ever  _ been around Sokka. But Zuko’s face was relaxed and friendly, and it seemed like he was genuinely pleased to see Sokka.

So Jet was right. That would be a first. Sokka had been a little worried that this was some elaborate prank that Jet was pulling, which he wouldn’t put past the guy. 

“How’s it going, Zuko?” Sokka asked.

“Oh, you know,” Zuko said, still lying on the floor. “Thinking about things.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

There was a pause.

“Like?” Sokka prodded.

“Oh, you know,” Zuko said again. “My place in the universe. The passage of time. What happens after we die. How birds know which way to go for the summer.”

“Actually,” Sokka said, “birds know which way to go because they have an internal magnet that tells them the way the inside of the earth is moving and then they figure out their directions from there. It’s kind of like how Toph sees by earthbending, except the birds don’t get their powers from a badger-mole, they get it from some compass in their insides.”

“Cool,” Zuko said.

Sokka was starting to feel weird about just standing over Zuko while Zuko lay on the floor, but he didn’t really want to lie down on the floor either as he was pretty sure neither Toph nor Zuko had ever cleaned it, so he just walked around the room and looked at Zuko’s things. There wasn’t a lot, and all of his things were things Sokka had packed for him, but it had been very late and dark when he’d done that.

“Can I ask you about this mask?” Sokka asked, pointing to the blue-painted mask that was propped up against the wall next to the portrait of a young woman.

“Totally,” Zuko said.

There was another pause.

Sokka sighed. “What’s the mask, Zuko?” he asked.

“It’s the Blue Spirit,” Zuko said. “From  _ Love Amongst the Dragons _ . It’s a play I was once in with my mother.”

Sokka gaped. “You were an actor?”

“Well,  _ she  _ was an actor,” Zuko corrected. “I was more of a prop than anything. I mostly just stood in the background of scenes. But I did have to recite a monologue at the end of the play, after the heroine and the hero vanquish the fox-spirit that was threatening their village.”

Sokka grinned. “How old were you when you did this?”

Zuko scrunched up his face to think. “Seven? I was young. Young enough that the mask was too big, and I couldn’t see through it because the eye holes were down by my cheeks. My mother had to hold my hand so I didn’t trip over anything.”

Sokka was not in the habit of calling things cute, but that was pretty fucking cute.

“I’d love to have seen that,” he said. “I am actually a connoisseur of the arts.”

“That’s my mother, in the picture, by the way,” Zuko added.

“She’s pretty,” Sokka said.

“Yeah.” Zuko sighed. He gestured at his face with a bitter expression. “I guess I’ll never know if I’ll take after her.”

“Oh,” Sokka said, embarrassed. “I’m sorry.” He wasn’t really sure what to say.

“It’s fine,” Zuko said. “But you’re right. She was pretty.”

“Was?”

“She died when I was thirteen.”

“I’m sorry,” Sokka said. “That sucks. My mom also died when I was thirteen.”

“Oh,” said Zuko. “How?”

“She got sick,” Sokka said. “Me and Katara, we think it was the factory. It made loads of people from our tribe sick.”

“Tribe?” Zuko repeated.

“Southern Water Tribe.” Sokka did the hand gesture, but it didn’t really lighten the mood.

“That might have been a Phoenix factory,” Zuko said.

Sokka frowned. “What?”

“The one that got your mom sick. It might have been us. It was probably us. The Southern Water Tribe is where we source our skunk-whale blubber, so we have a bunch of factories down there for the refinement process, which produces excess fumes that are expelled from the factory in smoke chimneys.” Zuko frowned. “It wouldn’t be improbable that it was our factory that did it. We have the market cornered down there.”

Sokka blinked.

Once, during a particularly bad storm, Sokka had fallen overboard. This was back in the early days of pirating, when Toph had just joined the crew and they were all still learning how to sail the Avatar. All it took was one bad wave, and Sokka was flung off the ship and into the water. 

The ocean hit his body like an electric current. Cold water surrounded him, drenched him. He felt it against his mouth, his throat, his hands. He couldn’t tell where he ended and the water began. He couldn’t tell up from down. 

_ This must be what drowning feels like,  _ he thought, before Katara pulled him out of the ocean with her bending.

“Why would you tell me that?” Sokka asked Zuko, his voice shaking. 

“I’m sorry,” Zuko said. He was still fucking lying there, staring up at the ceiling. “I don’t… I don’t want people to die.”

Sokka twitched. He’d never felt this angry before. Sokka had always had a temper, or at least he was quick to be defensive, but he’d never felt this cold, roiling rage before. It terrified him. He felt it in his whole body.

“You don’t want people to die,” Sokka repeated, incredulously.

Zuko put his hand over his face. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I don’t know why I told you that. I don’t know why I said it. I don’t know why I talk at all. I should just shut up forever.”

“Yeah,” Sokka said. “You should.”

Then he left and slammed Zuko’s door behind him.

He stormed up to the deck for some air. The rest of the crew was up there, looking bewildered at Sokka. He couldn’t take it. He jumped overboard.

The cold made everything sharper. Sokka felt every inch of his skin in detail. His head under the water, he screamed, anger bubbling out of his throat and rising to the surface. 

A few moments later, he felt his body get pulled out of the ocean by a rope of water around his waist. When he had been gently placed back on the ship, the water splashed down onto the deck around him.

“What the fuck, Sokka?” Katara demanded.

“Are you okay?” Aang asked.

“Nice swim?” said Toph.

They were all standing around him, looking down at Sokka on the deck. Sokka tried to rub the salt out of his eyes, which just made them sting more.

“Can Katara and I have the deck to ourselves, please?”

Aang and Toph disappeared into the hold. Sokka and Katara went to sit on a part of the deck that hadn’t been splashed.

After Sokka told Katara what Zuko had told him, she got very quiet. She did not dramatically throw herself into the water like Sokka did, for which Sokka was grateful. She just sat next to him, lips tight, head bowed.

“So, we were right,” she said.

“Yeah,” Sokka said. “Being right has never sucked so bad before.”

“You should have burned his house to the ground,” Katara said, her voice tight with anger.

“Yeah.”

They sat together for a moment in silence. The ship rocked a little along the waves.

“I got mad at Zuko,” Sokka said.

“Yeah,” Katara said, rolling her eyes. “We all heard the door slam.”

Sokka sighed. “I shouldn’t have. It wasn’t his fault. He was too young when Mom died.”

Katara grimaced. “So were we.”

Dinner that night was a tense affair. Aang had cooked, which meant Sokka didn’t even have meat to distract him from the awkwardness that was Zuko, sitting at the table with a vacant expression. It looked like he thought he could leave his mortal body if he just stared at the rice bowl hard enough. 

“Zuko,” Katara said.

Zuko flinched and turned to look at her. “Yep?”

Katara looked taken aback. “I just… Can you pass the daikon?”

Zuko flushed and nodded. About four seconds later, he passed the daikon.

Katara and Sokka exchanged a disturbed glance, which Zuko seemed to have noticed because he said, quickly: “You don’t have to worry about spending more time with me. My father’s bodyguards are going to hijack the ship and frogmarch me out of here at any second.”

Sokka snorted. “I can’t wait,” he said, but it was more joking than malicious.

By the end of dinner, Sokka noticed that his clothes had completely dried, not even leaving a wet patch on the wooden bench. They actually felt kind of warm and toasty, like he’d been sitting out in the sun. Huh. The hold must have been warmer than usual. It must be the storm coming.

The next morning, Sokka woke up to Aang already on deck, waving his arms back and forth to airbend into the sails. He frowned. Had Katara already raised the anchor?

“How long have you been up, Aang?” he asked, sitting up. 

“Not long,” Aang replied, cheerily. “Zuko and I talked this morning while you were sleeping.”

“Oh,” Sokka said. He raked his hair into a ponytail and stood up.

“He feels bad about your conversation yesterday,” Aang said, still airbending.

Sokka snorted. “Me too.”

“I feel that he is not very used to interacting with other people,” Aang continued. “You know, he lived alone for a long time, and now he’s on a ship with four strangers. I don’t think he really knows how to talk to people yet.”

“That makes sense.”

“You should talk to him some more!” Aang said. “Help him practice.”

“Thanks, Aang,” Sokka said. “You’re going to be a great captain one day.”

Aang grinned. “I know. I’m already planning the mutiny.”

So Sokka added it to his schedule: make conversation with Zuko. 

Zuko was a weird conversation partner. You’d think Sokka would be used to weird by now, considering he shared a ship with three prodigal benders who were all going through puberty, but Zuko was a different kind of weird that Sokka couldn’t really put his finger on.

For one thing, he was kind of a slow talker. Which was fine! Sokka didn’t have a problem with it, except that Sokka was incredibly impatient and sometimes found himself forgetting the first half of Zuko’s sentence before Zuko had even finished it. It also seemed like Zuko had a pretty bad memory because he would frequently tell the same story twice. 

This actually worked in Sokka’s favor, because it meant Sokka could tell the same joke multiple times and Zuko would laugh every time. Zuko had a  _ great  _ sense of humor, even if his laugh kind of sounded like a hog-buffalo’s snort.

As long as they just talked about safe topics, like the meaning of life and whether birds had feelings, and avoided dangerous topics, like their dead mothers, Sokka started to enjoy his afternoon conversations with Zuko.

  
  


A few days later, Aang woke Sokka up at dawn.

“What? Who’s hurt?” Sokka asked, scrambling to sit up.

“No one’s hurt,” Aang said. “But the air is heavy today. The storm is coming.”

Sokka stood up, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. “How long do we have?”

Aang fluttered his fingers in the air and cocked his head, thinking. “About four hours?”

“Got it,” Sokka replied. He combed his hair back into a ponytail and left Aang on the deck to go downstairs. He knocked on Katara and Toph’s door. Katara opened it, already dressed.

“Storm today,” he told her. 

“Got it,” Katara replied. She called over her shoulder to Toph: “Storm today!”

“Got it!” Toph called back.

While Katara went up to the deck to help Aang replace the sails with storm sails and Toph went into the hold to ensure the clay sealant between the wooden boards was as secure as could be, Sokka knocked on Zuko’s door.

Zuko opened the door a few seconds later, looking grouchy, his hair messy and uncombed. “What?” 

“Storm today,” Sokka said.

“So?”

Sokka rolled his eyes. “ _ So _ ,” he repeated, sarcastically. “I’m your captain. I want you secured and on deck with the rest of the crew so that if something happens, we’re all able to work together.” He also privately wanted Zuko on deck so that if he puked from seasickness, he had about a fifty-fifty chance of puking off the side of the ship.

Zuko wrinkled his nose. “I’m not a sailor.”

“Today you are,” Sokka told him.

“Whatever,” said Zuko, yawning. “I’ll be in my room. Come fetch me when the ship goes under, I guess.” He closed the door.

“Don’t even joke about that!” Sokka yelled at the door.

The Avatar had braved several storms in its time. Although they avoided certain areas during their monsoon seasons, it was inevitable that they would sail through the occasional bad weather event. After the incident during which Sokka fell overboard, the crew had figured out how to tie themselves to the ship’s masts to keep themselves from falling off the boat. As long as they just kept the boat upright, they would make it out alive.

When the rain started that afternoon, Sokka made everyone tie themselves to the masts--Katara and Aang on the foremast and Toph and Zuko on the main-mast. He made sure Zuko’s rope was as short as possible. He didn’t need him getting in the way. 

After checking and double-checking the knots on everyone else’s ropes, Sokka tied himself to the main-mast, just as the first thunderclaps boomed in the distance. 

It was shaping up to be a short, sharp storm. In a way, it was a mercy. The boat shuddered over the waves, Katara carving a path in the ocean for them, while Aang angled the sails to hit the waves head-on. The most potent storms were always the shortest. Sokka just had to keep the crew alive for a few miserable hours. As long as they kept the ship perpendicular to the waves, they wouldn’t risk getting flipped. Sokka ran a hand through his drenched hair and felt something akin to relief.

Then the main sail fell.

Sokka didn’t even see what did it--he was too focused on keeping the rudder straight to be staring up at the sail. But he heard it--the clatter of woven reeds hitting the hardwood deck. Aang looked over at Sokka in horror.

“I can’t airbend,” he said, and even if Sokka didn’t already know they were in trouble, he would have heard it in the slight tremor in Aang’s voice. “I can’t control the ship at all.”

“Fuck,” said Sokka. Next to him, he felt Toph tense.

From the other side of the ship, he heard Katara call: “I can try to keep us from turning, but I don’t know for how much longer!”

“Maybe I can climb up the mast and secure it again,” Aang suggested.

Sokka shook his head. “No, there’s too much of a lightning risk. Let me think of something.”

He closed his eyes, the ship roiling under him, the rain smacking against his skin.

“Uh, Sokka?” Toph’s voice said.

“What?”

“Zuko’s untying himself from the ship.”

Sokka’s eyes shot open. At the base of the main-mast, Zuko was pushing the ropes from around his waist to the ground. He stepped out of the rope and picked up the spar of the dropped sail.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Sokka yelled.

Zuko scowled. “Being a sailor.”

Then Zuko started climbing the mast, the sail’s spar tucked under his arm.

“ZUKO!” Sokka screamed. “Come down right now! Zuko. Zuko, I am fucking ordering you to--”

“Well, shit,” Toph said.

Zuko had reached the top of the mast. Sokka watched in horrified silence as Zuko attempted to tie the sail’s spar to the mast. About three seconds passed before Sokka couldn’t take it anymore.

“You have to wrap from under, not over!” he yelled through the torrential rain.

Another three seconds passed. Then Zuko raised his hands, holding himself to the mast with his legs. The sail stayed put, perfectly rigged. Zuko grinned. Rain was running down his face, his eyelashes were dark with it. His hair had completely come free from his typical topknot and was splayed out behind him in the wind like the tentacles of a jellyfish. He looked more alive than Sokka had ever seen him.

Sokka wondered why the client had described him as “frail.” 

Zuko looked down at Sokka, still grinning. He gave Sokka a little wave.

The world flashed with light.

Everything that happened next moved like a bad dream. Zuko fell like a puppet with its strings cut. He just dropped, quietly, from the top of the mast to the ocean. 

Sokka didn’t have enough air in his lungs to scream. He turned to look at Katara, who was already running to the side of the ship, raising her arms to waterbend Zuko out. While she did so, the ship shook like it was having a fit beneath them, the waves no longer being separated with Katara’s bending. Sokka watched, helplessly, as Katara twisted her arms and finally raised a limp body from the water. The moment Zuko’s body had been placed on the deck, Sokka handed the rudder to Toph and ran over. 

“He’s alive,” Katara said. 

Zuko kneeled on the deck to cough up a disturbing amount of seawater. Sokka courteously waited until it looked like Zuko had spat out all his water, before shoving Zuko upright, slamming his back against the mast. As Sokka started tying a rope around Zuko and the mast, pinning Zuko’s arms to his sides, Zuko blinked and looked at Sokka with a soft smile.

“I did it,” he said. 

“Don’t say another word,” Sokka growled. “Don’t fucking talk until this is over.”

Maybe the saltwater had splashed some sense into Zuko because, for once, he didn’t argue.

With the main-sail back up and the whole crew working together to navigate the ship through the storm, the rest of the afternoon passed in uneasy quiet, with only the drumming of the rain against the ship to fill the silence. A few hours later, the rain started to let up and the waves dropped a more gentle level. When the wind had died down and the ship had stopped rocking any more than usual, Aang told Sokka: “We’re out of it now.”

“Okay,” said Sokka. “We can untie.”

Usually, after a storm, the crew would cheer or high-five or do  _ something _ to congratulate themselves on making it through. Today, however, everyone shucked off their ropes in awkward silence. Except Zuko, who was still stuck to the main mast and unable to move.

Sokka marched over to Zuko. Zuko glared at Sokka, wet hair clinging to the sides of his face. 

“Are you gonna untie me now?” Zuko demanded.

“You disobeyed my direct orders,” Sokka said, his voice low and dangerous. 

“But I saved the ship,” Zuko said, defiantly.

“I am your captain,” Sokka said, poking Zuko in the chest. “You are on my ship. You do as I say.”

“I saved the ship,” Zuko repeated. His pupils were huge and dark.

“You could have died!” Sokka yelled. 

Zuko winced at the noise, but he didn’t back down. “I thought the client didn’t care if I lived or died,” he said, spitefully.

Sokka wanted to kill him. He felt his whole body vibrate with rage.

“What were you thinking?” he hissed, taking a step forward so he was right in Zuko’s space. They were so close he could see a drop of water sliding down Zuko’s forehead.

Zuko looked at Sokka with wild eyes. “I wasn’t thinking!” he hissed back. “I never fucking think!”

“Then, wh--”

Zuko surged forward, and for a strange moment Sokka thought Zuko was going to head-butt him, but then Zuko’s mouth collided with Sokka’s mouth in a hard, salty kiss.

Sokka stumbled backwards, instinctively wiping the salt off his mouth with the back of his hand. “What--”

Zuko didn’t say anything else. He just closed his eyes, leant his head back, and laughed.

Sokka turned to Katara, who looked about as confused as Sokka felt. “Did he hit his head?” he asked her.

Katara shook her head. “Not that I can tell.”

Aang clapped a hand on Sokka’s shoulder. “Sokka,” he said, quietly. “I think he’s high.”

Aang ended up being the one who untied Zuko. The moment he was free, Zuko ran below deck to lock himself in his room. He did not emerge for dinner.

“What was he thinking?” Katara exclaimed, over a bowl of flavorless congee Sokka had whipped up. “He knew there was a storm coming. Why did he choose  _ today  _ to... do that?”

Aang’s nose twitched. “I get the feeling he does this every day,” Aang said, his voice a little mournful.

Toph chuckled. “Sokka, don’t you talk to him every day? How did you not notice you were talking to a--”

“Stop,” Sokka said, sharply. “Everyone, stop talking. Captain’s orders.”

To his relief, Toph fell silent. The whole crew looked down at their bowls, awkwardly. Sokka felt bad--he hated using his captain’s card to discipline the crew-- but he was far more stressed about the fact that the ship had thin walls and there was no way Zuko couldn’t hear their conversation from his room.

If Zuko was still conscious, anyway. Sokka took a bite of congee and grimaced.

That night, Sokka slept in the hold. 

The next day was the second captain’s meeting on Kyoshi. Sokka wandered over the gangplank like a sleepwalker. He was so tired he felt it in his bones like the cold. 

At the meeting in Kyoshi’s hold, Jet and Suki both confirmed that their ships had passed through the storm without harm or loss of life. Sokka said the same, although it felt like a lie.

“And how is Zuko?” Suki asked.

“I…” Sokka looked down at the cup of green tea Suki had given him. The tea moved slowly back and forth with the rocking of the ship. “I don’t know,” he said, honestly.

“What do you mean?” Jet asked.

“I mean I don’t know,” Sokka replied. “He hasn’t come out of his room since… I don’t know what to do.”

Suki and Jet exchanged a glance, which was how Sokka knew the situation was truly dire.

“I thought you’d been getting along,” Suki said, slowly.

Sokka’s throat hurt. “We had,” he said. He turned to Jet and sighed. “This will be the first and last time I ever say this to you, but can you help me?”

  
  


This was Jet’s first time on the Avatar for a few years. Not much had changed about it, which he found interesting, since the Freedom Fighters loved to redecorate every time they found a new tapestry on someone else’s ship. Not every crew had Pipsqueak’s flair for interior design. He followed Sokka silently to a wooden door in the hold. 

Sokka nodded, then went back above deck. Jet waited until he heard Sokka engage in a conversation with some crewmember upstairs before he knocked on the door.

No reply.

“Uh, Zuko?” he asked. “Or, should I say, Lee?”

There was another pause. Then the door opened.

Zuko looked a mess. His hair was in a tangled heap around his shoulders, he had a huge dark circle under his unscarred eye, and he looked about two seconds from falling over. Upon seeing Jet, he opened the door wider and Jet entered the room.

“What are you doing here?” Zuko asked, closing the door behind them.

“You tell me,” Jet said. “I was asked to  _ come and talk some sense into you _ .” He caricatured Sokka’s bossy way of speaking, but Zuko didn’t even crack a smile.

Zuko didn’t say anything.

“Are you going to tell me what happened?” Jet prodded. “Sokka must be desperate, considering he asked  _ me  _ to come talk to you.”

“ _ Well _ ,” said Zuko, drily. “I disobeyed the captain’s orders and ended up almost getting struck by lightning and falling overboard during a storm and then Sokka yelled at me, so I panicked and kissed him. Also, I think my dad indirectly killed his mom.”

Jet blinked. He opened his mouth to say something like “that’s rough,” but what came out instead was: “Does your dad have a vacation home in Thác Mơ?” 

Zuko looked about as surprised as Jet felt.

“Uh, yeah,” Zuko said, frowning. “Why?”

“Just wondering if your dad also indirectly killed  _ my  _ parents,” Jet said, casually. His heart was pounding, but he kept his voice calm and light. “You know. In case you wanted to get all of your grievances out of the way at once.”

Zuko’s mouth twisted. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

Jet looked down at the floor. It was really dirty. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

He felt Zuko place a tentative hand on his shoulder. Jet shrugged it off and crossed his arms.

“Why am I the one who has to help you?” he asked, annoyed.

“You know me, Jet,” Zuko said. His eyes were lidded and sad. “You’re the only person here who knows me. Maybe you’re the only person who will ever know me.”

“You’re wrong,” said Jet, and he was horrified to hear a tremor in his voice. “I don’t know you at all.”

He and Zuko stared at each other for a moment.

Then, “Why did you lie to me?” Jet asked, desperately. “About your name, your family.”

Zuko sighed. “I didn’t want to be me anymore,” he said. “I thought I could move somewhere else and be someone else for a while. But I couldn’t. I know that now. I’m still me.”

“You’re still you.”

There was a moment of silence.

“You know,” Jet said. “The person you were when we met. You don’t have to change your name to be him. You can just decide to be him.”

“Yeah?” Zuko said, a small smile creeping to his lips.

“Yeah,” Jet said, quietly.

Zuko thought for a moment, then leaned forward and pressed his lips against Jet’s.

Jet felt himself lean into the kiss, before he broke away, taking a step backward and raising his hands.

“Nope,” he said. “Not doing this again.”

Zuko’s face fell. “Sorry,” he said.

Jet sighed. “Yeah. Me too.”

“Will you sit with me anyway?” Zuko asked.

Jet needed to get back to his ship. 

“Okay,” Jet said. 

He let Zuko lead him to the hammock hung up on one side of the room. It was hard for them to both sit in it at once--it wasn’t really a two-person hammock, so they ended up lying down together, chests pressed against each other. 

The feeling of Zuko’s weight against Jet’s body was so familiar and it sort of hurt, but in a good way. Like a comfortable bruise. Jet absentmindedly ran a hand through Zuko’s hair, untangling the knots, and Zuko closed his eyes. The hammock swayed gently.

Sokka spent the afternoon coiling and recoiling the ropes on deck. It wasn’t super necessary work, but he had to do something with his hands to feel productive. When Katara went into the hold to start preparing dinner, Sokka looked at the slowly sinking sun and frowned. What was taking Jet so long? He was starting to worry that inviting him to speak with Zuko was a bad idea.

Sokka went below deck and paced outside Zuko’s door for a minute, before caving and knocking on the door.

“Come in,” said Jet’s voice from the other side.

Nervous, Sokka swung open the door. He was expecting to see Zuko in his typical spot on the floor, but both he and Jet were lying in the hammock together. Sokka was astonished. He’d never seen Jet so domestic-looking.

He walked a little closer and saw that Zuko was asleep on Jet’s chest, mouth open and his eyebrows furrowed in a frown. Jet looked at Sokka, flushing. That was also surprising. Sokka didn’t realize Jet was even capable of embarrassment.

“Tap out?” Jet asked.

“What?” said Sokka.

“Whatever,” Jet said. He took a moment to extricate himself from Zuko and stand up, causing the hammock to swing in the process. “I gotta get back on my ship. Look after him, will you?”

“Of course,” Sokka said. Isn’t that what he’d already been doing? 

Jet nodded, then left.

Sokka looked down at Zuko, who seemed to have woken up. He didn’t look surprised to see Sokka standing over him.

“I’m sorry,” Zuko said, quietly.

Sokka shook his head. “No, I’m sorry,” he said.

“Alright then,” Zuko agreed, far too quickly.

Sokka chuckled. “You’re such a dick.”

Zuko sighed. “Yeah.”

“Do you want to join us for dinner?” Sokka asked.

“No,” said Zuko, rubbing a hand over his face. “But I’ll do it anyway.”

When Zuko was Lee and a tea server and living in the Earth Kingdom with his uncle, he once had a very bad day. It wasn’t unusual for Zuko to have bad days. But this one stuck with Zuko. The memory of it crept into his thoughts any time he found himself absent-minded or bored. It wasn’t like Zuko hadn’t had worse days because he definitely had, but something about this day made it stick to his thoughts like a barnacle to a ship.

It was a day he and Jet had gotten into a fight, which they did about once a week. Zuko can’t even remember what they’d been fighting about, just how it felt--deep, cold breaths of air and a heartbeat that felt like it was losing its rhythm. It was the day a customer at the tea shop had smashed a teapot on the floor and Zuko had accidentally cut his finger on a shard trying to clean up the mess. It was the day his uncle had found Zuko’s collection of Phoenix oil bottles under Zuko’s tatami and confronted him about it over dinner.

“That’s my medicine,” Zuko had reassured his uncle. “It’s for my migraines. I need it.”

Then his uncle started crying. Zuko stared at him in horror. He had no idea why Uncle was being so dramatic about this.

“Do you want me to suffer?” he demanded. “Do you want me to spend every day in pain?”

Uncle just put his head in his hands, tears still falling from his eyes. The wooden table was dotted with the wet spots.

Zuko refused to witness these theatrics. He shoved his bowl to the side and left the house. He wandered the streets for a while, just trying to get his breathing under control, stop his hands from shaking.

Then Azula showed up.

“Hey, Zuzu.”

Zuko was so surprised at seeing his sister that for a moment he forgot he was upset. He hadn’t seen her since he’d left his father’s house eight months ago.

“Azula! What are you…”

“I’m here to offer you a position at Phoenix Manufacturing!” Azula said, smiling. She was wearing lipstick. That was new. She’d grown up since Zuko had last seen her. “As the youngest ever director of marketing, I have decided on a bold new advertisement strategy. How would you like to move back to Caldera to be the face of the campaign?”

Zuko frowned. The Phoenix oil was still working its way through his system, and he hadn’t followed half of her speech. “Did Dad send you?” he asked.

Azula blinked. “Yes,” she said. “He did.”

“Okay,” Zuko said. “I’ll come home.”

  
  


After dinner, Zuko offered to do the dishes. While everyone else went up on deck to relax for the evening, he pulled on Sokka’s tunic, holding him back. 

“Hey,” Zuko said.

“Hey,” Sokka said back.

Zuko wrinkled his nose. “Sorry for… yeah.”

“Yeah,” Sokka repeated, stupidly.

“Can I make it up to you?” Zuko asked.

This was how Zuko ended up on deck performing the Blue Spirit monologue, mask, dance, and all, in front of the Avatar crew that evening.

Above the ship, Azula, Ty Lee, and Mai were looking down from their zeppelin. They’d survived the storm in one piece, thanks to Azula’s expert piloting. She was pleased to find that the clouds had remained, giving the zeppelin reasonable cover as they hovered above the pirate ship that had kidnapped her brother.

“Oh my spirits,” said Ty Lee. “What are the pirates making him do?”

“Why is he wearing a mask?” Mai commented.

“That was our mother’s mask,” Azula said, her lip twitching in bemusement.

Ty Lee cocked her head. “He kind of looks like a circus animal!”

“What a horrible thing to say,” Azula said. “You’re absolutely right.”

They watched Zuko do a cartwheel across the deck, then wave his hands in the air like a possessed person.

“So, are we going to rescue him or what?” Mai said, flatly.

“Fine,” Azula said, tearing her eyes away from her brother’s very entertaining pirate humiliation. “I suppose that’s what we’re here for.”

She pressed a button on the dashboard and let the anchor drop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNINGS: environmental racism, murder, passive suicidal ideation, drowning, drug abuse
> 
> MORE DETAILED CONTENT WARNINGS: It is revealed that the Freedom Fighters' parents died from a poisoned water supply. It is implied that this was done by some murderous Fire Nation rich people who wanted to gentrify the area. During his backstory, Jet is passively suicidal due to trauma, but he gets better. 
> 
> Sokka learns more about the environmental racism resulting in his mother's death. During this part, he remembers an incident in which he almost drowned.
> 
> Zuko is implicitly on drugs for most of this chapter (and, it is implied, the previous chapters as well). Although he does not think he has a problem, other characters (including the Avatar crew and his uncle) do. Zuko is also passively suicidal and puts himself in mortal danger during the storm scene.
> 
> Please feel free to comment if you have any questions/concerns about the content of this chapter! It's hard to write content warnings when a lot of the stuff is, like, implied/subtextual lol.


End file.
